Ask the Author: L.A. Little
Answered Questions (6)
L.A. Little
I don't even understand that question. Before I could read and write I drew my stories in sequential panels. As soon as I could write well enough to write a story I did. I've written something almost every day of my life since I could hold a pencil. It's everything else that I need to be inspired to do. Writing is my resting state. If you're a fiction writer at your core, you're automatically filing away everything you see as a reference for a future story, you're running character dialog in your head or out loud in the shower, you're scribbling ideas over soy sauce smudges on a napkin at your anniversary dinner--it's just what you are. Now, the discipline to see things through is another matter, but it's not inspiration. It's grit and determination. It's a conscious decision to do the hard part of being what you are instead of letting life give you excuses to be something else and die without ever realizing the purpose of your soul.
L.A. Little
Well, it's actually a re-write of a book I wrote and published in the small press world in the early 90s. The idea came to me while I was travelling as a music journalist on the Lollapalooza tour. I was alone the entire time, travelling through shady urban areas and lonely rural countryside, and then lost among tens of thousands people on these huge festival dates. It makes you feel very small when you go out across this vast and varied country on your own, and very alone to realize that you are isolated and unrecognized among 60,000 people. To me, those sorts of feelings lend themselves to a horror or dark fantasy story. I don't address those feelings as directly in the first book, but that's definitely the mood I'm after.
L.A. Little
I finished the first draft of my latest novel in February and from March to July I worked exclusively on short stories for an anthology that I hope to have out by Christmas. August through Labor Day I was on vacation. Now that I'm ramping back up I'll be doing edits and re-writes on The Flatstone Beach, Book 1 of The Paler World series, as well as the new stories for the anthology. My next novel is going to be the first full length installment of the Deadblood series, A Mourning Walk. I hope to get rolling on that one before the end of this year. I'll be using the comic book scripts from the unpublished comic series as an outline so it will be a very different way of working for me, but I hope it will make me more productive.
L.A. Little
Read a lot and write a lot. That's pretty much the only way to move forward. Don't let reading, studying, or other "preparation" keep you from writing though. Set a daily goal that you can consistently meet and then do it. Some people use a time measurement or number of pages. I use word count. I'm very busy aside from writing, but I know I can do 400 words per day and I almost always do. Also, take breaks from writing. You can burn out like with any other job. I used to look forward to writing while on vacation and so I created this paradigm where I was battling the clock to do as much as possible before my vacation was over. That's not relaxing. Now when I'm on vacation, I'm on vacation from everything and it's awesome. I also take a few days to a couple of weeks off after every project I complete so I can cleanse my creative palette before I dive into the next one. I probably only write about nine to ten months out of the year, but in that time I'm intensely productive, writing 80,000 words or more on average. Hopefully more of that will be fiction going forward.
L.A. Little
Sharing a vision of my own with another person and seeing or hearing that it had an effect on their emotional state or world view. My favorite stories are the ones that moved me or affected my thinking in a way that I can still identify as a turning point in how I look at something. I hope to be that for others at some point.
L.A. Little
I don't get what I think of when I hear "writer's block" (knock on wood!). I have drawers and notebooks crammed with ideas, character sketches, and so forth. My problem has never been that I lacked ideas to fill my writing time, but rather that I will ultimately leave a great deal of work unfinished no matter how long I live. My big dilemma is what I should work on next. When I get stuck in a story, I just power through. I keep writing even if it's crap until I get to the next part of the story that's clear in my mind. Once I complete the first draft, no matter how bad it is, I can then go back and fix what's broken.
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